Tickets to see the headline act of the horticultural world, Piet Oudolf, at
Glastonbury have sold like hot cakes.

Tickets sell fast in Somerset. For Glastonbury, of course, but who would have thought that in the first two hours of booking, 1,000 people would vie for a place to listen to Piet Oudolf talk to Mariella Frostrup – without slides? But Piet's horticultural fame and ageing rock star looks, combined with the delightful Mariella, made this a very hot ticket. It must also have helped that the At the Chapel restaurant in Bruton is a classy venue, famous for its food. I was intrigued to see what kind of audience the event attracted. There were gardeners, but perhaps only half of those there had ever held a trowel. These were designers, architects and tastemakers, because Piet's latest project is an acre and a half of rich Somerset soil around the new Hauser & Wirth gallery on the edge of Bruton. Hauser & Wirth already has cutting-edge spaces in Zurich, London and New York. With its latest venture, on a derelict farm site, they hope to attract 40,000 visitors a year.

Officially, the evening was to publicise Piet's latest book. Planting – A New Perspective is a fascinating and technical exposition of how Piet has changed the way plants are used, but it is not an easy read. I was impressed by the amount of homework Mariella had done. Although his English is immaculate, Piet can retreat behind a language barrier if he wants to avoid a question and the occasional teasing query: "You have claimed that a planting often ends up even better than your imagination. What do you mean by that?" received a stupefied look. No one of Piet's super celeb status expects to be faced with anything less than adulation.

I am a big Oudolf fan, and was one of the earliest visitors to his garden. What I took away from that first visit was the memory of slices of yew hedge at the back, like a Vorticist painting, and the solid shapes of bushes in the beds as a contrast to all the froth of the perennials. As a souvenir, I smuggled home Persicaria 'Firedance', which still grows here. A year ago, I walked the High Line in New York and marvelled at that ribbon of green above the city. Unlike Tom, I do have reservations about translating the Oudolf style to domestic gardens. Like contemporary art, the perennials Piet paints with need a vast canvas.

I found the swaths and blocks of repeated clumps in his early work at Pensthorpe too overpowering and formulaic for small spaces, but the mingled matrix style that he seems to be moving towards is nearer to nature. However, having fewer plants, and most of them grasses, may seem dull to committed gardeners. My other reservation is that Oudolf gardens start later than most of ours. Summer is their moment, and then they survive in sepia form during the winter. Our winters are gloomy enough as it is, and many gardeners do not share what Tom describes as Piet's love of melancholic naturalism. Most of us prefer live plants to dead ones, so our winters are cheered more by early snowdrops than by stems of buff and taupe.

After the talk, I asked how well Piet's designs last; in my experience the success of a scheme can be attributed 40 per cent to design and 60 per cent to maintenance. Piet's answer was that he made sure he had good people to take care of the projects, and he seemed puzzled when I pressed him on whether he had shifted that percentage, but reading Tom's article last week I had my answer. Six years on, Tom found the plants at Pensthorpe were in almost exactly the positions where they had been planted. That fact – no maintenance – is what dissuades amateur gardeners from adopting the Oudolf approach, because the process of tending a garden is what can be, for real gardeners, the best fun ever.